Brown University had a shooting on its campus. That's terrible, and from the moment I heard about it, I remember my maternal grandmother telling me she wished I'd been a better student so I could have gone there due to some family connection way back in the past. She was into stuff like that.
But based on what I'm seeing here, the real world educated me far better, especially on things like rights.
In a Baltimore Sun op-ed, a Brown student talks about being on campus during the shooting, which is unimpressive in and of itself, since I'm pretty sure I've been closer to shootings than she has.
Unfortunately for her, she gets to a point that I just couldn't ignore.
What happened at Brown was horrific and heartbreaking, but it was not unpredictable. A university campus, a place meant for learning and safety, was transformed into a scene of unspeakable horror in minutes. Hallways filled with panic. Students barricaded doors and texted loved ones goodbye, unsure if help would come in time.
Sen. Chris Murphy was right when he said that the Providence community will never recover. Some wounds do not close. They simply become part of the landscape. The students who survived will carry this trauma with them long after graduation. Families will forever measure time by before and after.
Sen. Jack Reed noted that the shooting came hours before the 13-year anniversary of Sandy Hook. That detail matters. We have lived with this reality for more than a decade, and yet we continue to act surprised when it happens again. We lower flags. We issue statements. Then we move on.
We should not.
We owe it to the people whose lives were ended and forever altered to confront the real issue. School mass shootings are the consequence of a country that has made the widespread availability of deadly weapons a political prerogative rather than treating public safety as a duty.
After every shooting, the same arguments surface. More police. More locks. More drills. These measures may reduce harm at the margins, but they do not address the core problem. A society flooded with guns will continue to experience gun violence. That is not ideology. It is cause and effect.
It's a "political prerogative" now, is it?
I mean, if that were true, then she might have a point. After all, a prerogative is an exclusive right or privilege not available to the masses. If gun ownership were a political prerogative, then it would mean that only an exclusive group of people would be able to own them. If school shootings were happening with lawfully owned firearms, it would be the result of that group and no one else.
Except, it's not a prerogative. It's a right.
A right means that everyone has access to that right. It's not kept for a select group of people, but is the default setting for everyone. Only those who lose that right after due process of law (or a red flag law, which is its own nightmare) are barred from owning a firearm.
Brown has done a terrible job of educating this poor child if she can't tell the difference. Then again, whatever schools she went to for high school and even earlier also failed to educate her properly on the matter.
The irony here?
If people like her get what she wants, gun ownership actually would become a political prerogative.
Of course, she also labors under the whole idea of more guns somehow equate to more crime, which I can understand how someone could be mistaken on that. If you don't recognize the role firearms play in self-defense, you would think such a thing.
But following the Bruen decision, when we suddenly had more guns on our streets than ever before, the homicide rate has been declining. In fact, we're looking at a historic low in the homicide rate this year, all despite our streets being "flooded" with more guns.
So, while I miss my grandmother very much, I'm glad she didn't get her wish for me to go to Brown.
Instead, I learned stuff.
